Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Leadership Development

Beyond Leadership is Horizon Point’s line of resources for managers of people. Managing ourselves is a distinct set of behaviors from managers the work of others, and we are here to help. Read stories in this category if you are ready to take the next step in your own leadership development (or if you’re looking for resources for someone else).

  • 4 Ways to Cultivate Openness to Experience to Enhance Innovation and Leadership

    4 Ways to Cultivate Openness to Experience to Enhance Innovation and Leadership

    “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain

    I have recently returned from a nine-day trip to Turkey.  It’s been almost five years since I’ve traveled internationally, so I was excited that a trip that I thought would most likely not happen this year due to the COVID pandemic in fact did.  

    I was able to travel with my dad through Educational Opportunities, which is a company he has been a host with for a few years.  The trip gave us the opportunity to be a part of a group that explored the country and learned about the history behind prominent places in the early Christian church. 

    As excited as I was to get to take part in this opportunity, I was somewhat dreading it as well.  With three kids, two of which are in the throws of spring activities and one who is at the age where all you do is chase him, it makes leaving the country a logistical nightmare for my husband without help. In addition, having one work project that had gone haywire and two more that needed to be wrapped up, led me to be apprehensive about leaving for an extended period of time.  I was exhausted preparing to be gone by the time I got on the plane to exit the country. 

    Nevertheless, travel is and most likely always will be an opportunity for me to grow and learn.  I need to set aside time to do it. The trip reiterated for me the importance of building the muscles of openness to experience and what benefits it can bring to our people interactions, work performance, and leadership skills. 

    Psychology Today describes openness to experience in this way and articulates some of its benefits: 

    In the field of psychology, openness to experience refers to our measurable individual interest in art and beauty, our attention to our sensations and feelings, our intellectual curiosity, our preference for variety, and our active imagination. Put simply, it is the drive to explore novel aspects of human experience and the willingness to consider perspectives different than your own.

    Openness is also an essential trait of successful innovators and creatives throughout history. With an appreciation of diverse perspectives and a willingness to try new things, you can better navigate daily challenges and discover novel solutions. Studies even show that openness to experience positively correlates with increased job performance and more creativity.

    Openness to experience is also positively correlated to leadership.

    Travel is one of the best ways to cultivate “novel aspects of human experience and the willingness to consider perspectives different than your own.”  But you don’t have to travel halfway around the world to strengthen your openness to experience muscles.  Here are four steps to thinking about travel as a way to grow your openness experience and thus your ability to innovate, think creatively, and lead:

    1. Travel the place you call home.  No matter how small the place you call home is, you most likely have not seen it all.  There are streets I’ve never driven down in the town I live in.  I drive the same routes seeing the same things every day, as most of us do.  Take a day to go a different way to work, or school or the store, paying close attention to the novel surroundings.  Pick a place that is close to home where you’ve never eaten, never shopped, or never explored and go there instead of where you always frequent.  What new thoughts do these new places bring to mind? 

    2. Travel through a good book.  Opening your mind may just mean opening a new book as often as you can.  Choose books about places you’ve never been, people who are different than you are, and on topics, you’ve never explored.  What can the book teach you about something you’ve never experienced and where does it prompt you to explore further?

    3. Travel through new relationships.  One of the most fulfilling things about our trip to Turkey was our local guide, “Art”.   Art’s knowledge of Turkish history, as well as current events, was unbelievable.  Raised in a conservative Muslim home where she often felt controlled and stifled, she was the first person in her family to receive a college education.  She spoke openly about her opinions about politics, religion, and the history that has impacted the country she calls home.  She referred to us all as “family” and was an open and active listener when it came to both the group’s questions and opinions that may or may not have mirrored her own.  Despite so many differences in my experiences and hers, I found so many parallels as well, and I will continue to reflect on her impact. 

     

    Art in action in Ephesus.

    New relationships could be with people that live in your neighborhood, or it could be with someone halfway around the world. Our relationships with the literal neighbors we have that are in different stages of life than we are have been invaluable.  Just as valuable has been the relationships I’ve cultivated with “neighbors” around the world; I had the privilege of attending graduate school with a diverse group of people. One individual was a Fulbright Scholar from Oman.  She now lives back in Oman and has three children.  My two oldest children are now pen pals with her oldest two.  The dialogue between children living a world away, with a different faith background, and in a very different culture has prompted wonderful questions from my children that I know will grow their openness to experience whether they ever get the chance to visit the Middle East in their lifetime or not. 

    What “neighbor” across the street or around the world can you correspond with regularly?  What can you gain from their insights and experiences?

    4. Travel to a faraway place.  What place(s) in the world would you suspect are the most different from your day-to-day world?  If time and resources allow, I’d encourage you to go there.  Whereas Turkey was more westernized than I had envisioned, there were so many unique aspects of the country that exposed me to new landscapes, people, food, architecture, and ways of operating.  The call to prayer five times a day regardless of whether we were in Istanbul, a city of 18 million people, or in a rural town where most people are farmers was an opportunity to reflect on a cultural norm in a country that is 99+% Muslim all while exploring the foundational places of the early Christian church.  It provided a very unique way to reflect on religion and faith and the way in which both have shaped history and current events. 

    As travel opens back up across the globe, how can you set aside time and resources to make a trip full of learning and reflection happen for you? 

    Novel experiences allow us to reflect on new norms and ways of being that could be relevant to our world and open us to broader possibilities. You don’t have to travel around the world to be open to and experience something new and for the journey to be fun. 

    What new place will you visit soon? 

  • How to Create a Great Day in Your Neighborhood

    How to Create a Great Day in Your Neighborhood

    You know me, I oblige my husband about once or twice a year and watch a movie with him.  He told me he’d gotten It’s a Great Day in the Neighborhood especially for me, knowing it would be “my kind of movie”. It was.  

    The movie is based on a 1998 Esquire cover story titled “Can You Say…. Hero?”.  In the movie, the journalist Tom Junod, fictionalized in the film as Lloyd Vogel, undergoes a transformation of world view through Mr. Rogers played by Tom Hanks.   Lloyd sets out to uncover Mr. Rogers as a fraud, and Mr. Rogers ends up changing his life in the process. 

    About 50 minutes into the movie (46:03 to be exact if you want to watch it) Lloyd has a chance to meet Mr. Rogers’ wife.  He asks her, “So, how does it feel to be married to a living saint?”

    Her response is profound, and I think it is the linchpin of the whole movie.  She says:

    “You know, I’m not fond of that term. If you think of him as a saint, then his way of being is unattainable. He works at it all the time. It’s a practice. He’s not a perfect person. He has a temper.  He chooses how he responds to that anger.”

    “That must take a lot of effort,” Lloyd says.  

    She goes on: “He does things every day that help to ground him.  He reads scripture.  He swims laps. He prays for people by name. He writes letters-hundreds of them. He’s been doing that since I met him.” 

    Mr. Rogers approaches and gives his “love” a kiss and tells her he will be a few hours. Then he turns to Lloyd and says,  “Lloyd, I thought we’d spend some time together.” 

    Throughout the rest of the movie you see him spending time with Lloyd.  Talking to him, helping him reconcile with his dying father, and coming to terms with what it means to be a father who didn’t have a positive father figure in his life.   

    And you see him swimming his laps, praying for Lloyd and his family members by name, and writing letters. 

    In almost all leadership training series that we do, we cover a portion called Personal Leadership.  It’s about being able to lead yourself before you can lead others. This allows you to serve others and influence them through your behavior.  In this, we talk a lot about what you can control (your behavior) and what you can’t (almost everything else) through the lens of Stephen Covey’s circle of control versus circle of influence.  We talk about focusing on what is important, not just urgent, and focus on creating habits and maintaining them in order to produce outcomes and results.  

    I think from now on, I may just show It’s a Great Day in the Neighborhood instead of talking through all these concepts to illustrate the impact that personal leadership can have on our ability to influence others. 

    It may not be swimming laps or reading scripture, praying for people by name, or writing letters.  But, I would venture to guess that there are probably three to five things you can do daily that will have the greatest positive impact on your life, and in turn, will help you have the greatest positive impact on others. 

     

    What do you need to do today and every day to create a great day in your neighborhood? 

  • 4 Ways Leaders Can Keep Remote Work Pros from Becoming Cons

    4 Ways Leaders Can Keep Remote Work Pros from Becoming Cons

    I may be the only person in America that actually considered getting office space instead of ditching it in 2020.  Having run a business for almost ten years totally remote, I was beginning to question whether that was the best option for me and the business.

    As a company, three of our core values- people first, passion, and productivity- are guided by this statement: “To help drive passion and productivity, we don’t care how or where work gets done, just that it gets done in a way that meets client needs. This coincides with our desire to put people first by allowing them the autonomy to make decisions based on their personal preferences. We believe this stimulates passion and productivity.” 

    I believe this guiding principle has led to my productivity and the productivity and retention of our team and echoes what has been found in research from Harvard Business Review, among others, that workers (specifically knowledge-based workers in the HBR article) are more productive remotely. 

    So what gives?  This chart found at ventureharbor.com might provide some insights: 

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Like many others, I’ve been working largely from home with kids also going to school in our home on and off for the last year.  Unplugging after work has also been a challenge when the to-do list is long and the interruptions are large (“Mom, my teacher can’t hear me, something is wrong with the sound on my computer!”  “Mom, how do you spell contagious?” Mom, I’m hungry!….” It never ends…. Especially when there is also an 18-month-old that isn’t in school but is very BUSY all the time underfoot too.) 

    In addition, people seem to be working longer, or at least working on very different schedules.  From a LinkedIn report on what WFH means: “Workers in Austria, Canada, the UK, and the US are logging 2.5 hours more each day on average, according to Bloomberg, with a longer workday becoming the new normal globally. But while many have more meetings and emails to catch up on, having a longer workday doesn’t necessarily mean more hours working, per The Washington Post. Some people have adopted new work schedules in which they work later but have longer breaks throughout the day.” 

    So even though remote work can and has brought about significant positive outcomes, including potential productivity gains, reduced office space costs, and employees having more autonomy, there are always two sides to every coin. What side of the coin someone is landing on is largely an issue of their current and specific personal circumstances and the realization that too much of a good thing is, well, bad. 

    Leaders need to be mindful that everyone’s situation is different and be aware that the advantages of remote work also lead to challenges. Once this is done, leaders can support their people at the individual level and provide resources to help support productive work.   

    Much of Microsoft’s research on what makes a great manager, which was published pre-pandemic, still holds true in a remote working world.  This guides some ideas for practicing strong remote work leadership: 

    1. Set guardrails around communication, productivity, and working hour expectations.  Many of our clients have talked extensively about the need for manager training around the new way of working, particularly respecting boundaries around work time and response expectations.  One client told me, “I don’t want to go back into the office full-time, but I feel like I’m expected to be checking email before 7 am and I am often called routinely after 6 or 7 pm about unimportant work things by my boss.  Most types of calls would not have been urgent when we worked in the office and could have waited until the next day, but now for some reason, these non-urgent issues seem to need to be resolved before the end of the day. The new expectation is, you’re right there by your computer all the time, so let’s just handle this now. There has got to be a healthy balance.”  As a leader, make sure you are guarding people’s line between work and home when the home is now the office.

    2. Realize these guardrails may be unique to each person.  One person may need to be sending emails before 7 am because they are also a schoolteacher from 8 am to Noon when virtual school is taking place for their kids.  They need to be productive first thing in the morning, take a break, then return to the “office” for an extended time than when the standard workday takes place.  Talk to each of your employees (see number three, hold regular one-on-ones) and see what they need and how you can effectively communicate their needs and working arrangements to all team members that rely on and collaborate with them. 

    For example, I may need to work on the weekends (as I’m doing now writing this post) because this past week my kids were home all week due to the winter weather.  But that doesn’t mean I’m expecting my entire team to be working on the weekends too.  One of our team members has a lot of commitments with her family over the weekends, but her kids are older than mine, so she isn’t interrupted by their needs as much during the week even if they are home. Her regular schedule is working intensely Monday-Thursday so she can have time on Fridays to get personal things done and/or travel with her family for kids sporting activities.  I don’t try to schedule anything for her or with her on Fridays.  We have yet another team member that is a night owl.  The girl can crank out some good work well after I go to bed and it is in my inbox the next morning.  Yet another person has volunteer commitments that are meaningful to her and our work, so I try to be mindful of her commitments there when considering her workload and times for the meeting. 

    3. Hold regular one-on-ones but avoid virtual meeting overload.  In a virtual setting, request that your people turn their cameras on while you are meeting one-on-one.  This provides the needed context for what can be learned by what is not being said through people’s expressions and body language.  You can do this while assuring them that you are not at all bothered by a kid/spouse/pet coming into the picture at times and that if they need to pause the meeting to handle something, that is fine.  In addition, one guardrail to manage is to make sure that just because it is convenient and easy to convene a virtual meeting, doesn’t necessarily mean you need one.  Make sure a meeting is the best way to facilitate communication. Don’t meet when an email will work just as well. 

    4. Provide specific resources based on each person’s needs.  This may be office space for someone to utilize, not all the time, but at certain times when distractions at home seem to be the highest.  As seen in the chart, loneliness is one of the biggest struggles with remote work. What can you do to support human interaction needs in a remote world?  One simple thing may be encouraging people to turn on their camera while in virtual meetings so people can be seen, not only heard.  Likewise, another may need to keep their camera off because their office is also the classroom and their six-year-old is working beside them. The chart also describes a problem, you may need to simply tell someone on your team to take a vacation.  If you’re holding regular one-on-ones and understand people’s unique situations, you should know when someone is approaching burnout. 

    All in all, I’m still on the fence about whether office space is necessary for me and my team.  But if it ever does become something we invest in, I know I’ll make sure that my team knows that the office is available for them, not a requirement of them.  When clear expectations and a mindset of service excellence are set, I still firmly believe that people get their best work done when they get to decide how, when, and where to do it. 

    How are you managing the pros and cons of remote work? 

  • Four Simple Steps to Improve Your Business Writing

    Four Simple Steps to Improve Your Business Writing

    I often work with clients who aim to improve communication within their organizations. Many of them naturally focus their concerns on the verbal communication issues within their company but fail to evaluate the impact that their written communication may have. 

    Here are four simple steps to help improve your written communication: 

    1. Consider your audience. When preparing to draft written communication, whether it’s an email, marketing materials, or a business report, consider your audience. How you address a customer may be very different from how you would address an employee. How you present information on your company’s fourth-quarter earnings and goals for the next quarter will be very different when addressing top leadership versus addressing an all-staff meeting. 
    2. Plan out what you want and need to say. What is the purpose of your written communication? Think about what you need to say before you actually start writing. What are your key points and how can you best address those points? If you’re writing a report or preparing a presentation, create an outline of key points and the order in which you want to address them. 
    3. Write and review. Write with purpose and don’t rush through it. And review what you’ve written as you go, and often. Does what you’ve written get the right point across and does it flow well? As I’m writing this now, I’ve already gone back and re-read it four times from the start. After I wrote #1 and #2, I re-read them two or three times and made adjustments. 
    4. Have someone proofread it. While I’m not suggesting you have someone proof every email you send, if you’re drafting longer documents such as reports or proposals, or materials that will go out to the public such as marketing materials or articles, have a second set of eyes look it over. They may just find some minor typos or grammar adjustments, or they may provide feedback on how to improve certain sections or points. When I finish writing this article, one of my colleagues will proof it before we post it.  

    Evaluation is also key to improving your written communication skills. As you implement the four steps above to help improve your written communication, consider ways to measure your success. This may include having employees fill out a brief survey after a staff meeting, evaluating sales after a new marketing campaign, or tracking the number of proposals submitted and how many contracts were won or the feedback that was returned. 

    What is one way that you can evaluate the success of your written communication? 

  • 4 Exercises to Enhance Your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts

    4 Exercises to Enhance Your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts

    I sat down to watch The Social Dilemma with my husband this past weekend. OH.MY. Netflix describes the show as a “documentary-drama hybrid [that] explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.” 

    Besides the realization that our every move and word, maybe even our every thought at some point, is being tracked by our smartphones and computers for the purpose of benefiting a profit machine, I was most fascinated by the premise that social media is one of the key factors polarizing us as a people and growing divides in our world.  Basically, social media and search engines perpetuate our divisiveness by the stuff it “feeds” us. 

    How do we combat these engines? How do we overcome the us versus them in so many aspects of our lives? 

    We’ve always focused on intentional leadership and team development at Horizon Point, but the last year has brought about a hyper-focus on making explicit how it ties to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the workplace.  How do we overcome the us versus them mentality in the workplace has been a question we are continually asking ourselves and seeking to help our clients tackle. 

    Much of what is out there now focuses on training interventions that educate people on conscious and unconscious bias, seeking to build self-awareness and change behaviors. 

    But as a recent Forbes article focused specifically on racism articulates, the head and the heart have to be engaged before the hands- or behavior- can follow.  And a key piece of this is self-awareness but it is also other awareness.  We are polarized because we don’t actually know people.  The Forbes article articulates this so well: 

    I’m constantly surprised to learn that people who work closely together and literally log thousands of hours side by side in the workplace don’t really know each other. Until we close the distance, our relationships remain superficial and transactional. In that closeness—in living, working, eating, and breathing together—regard and affection don’t automatically result unless we deliberately connect and mutually invest in our relationships.

    So what do we do? 

    Using an Encounter Group format (also referred to as t-groups), we can begin to engage people in talking to each other and listening to each other in a psychologically safe way in order to direct the head, heart, and eventually, the hands to embrace each other instead of despising each other despite all the things out there that seem to be programming us to tear each other apart.

    As the Neuroleadership Institute states in a blog post, we have to activate insights to change habits which is necessary for behavior change. “Insights are the breakthrough moments that change how people see the world, and our research shows they are highly motivating — when we have “Aha” moments, we really want to act on them.”

    We can do this through the encounter group format.

    Here are some ideas for exercises within an encounter group or similar group format that you as a leader can facilitate or hire an outside facilitator to conduct: 

    1. Sharing Story.  “To initiate connecting, model and assign your team members the task of sharing their stories with each other. Be the first mover by sharing appropriate background and experiences about yourself. After demonstrating your own vulnerability ask, ‘Would you tell me your story?’” states the  Forbes article.  

    We do this in a group format by giving participants a sheet of paper that has up to seven sections where they can write up to seven experiences that have shaped their life and who they are. We ask them to share stories that are not just work-related and that incorporate not only adult but also childhood experiences.  We give them time to reflect on this and then they come back together and verbally share their stories with the group.

    When done right, people share openly and you can usually hear a pin drop in the room while one person shares the experiences that shaped them.  I’ve never seen people listen as intently to others as when we’ve done this exercise with some groups.  It is also amazing to see how many shared experiences happen amongst the group between people that on the surface seem to share none. There are also many “aha” moments that happen where people say, “Oh, now I understand why you behave that way!” and come to appreciate that behavior that they may have once resented. 

    2. Reading Story.  Assign readings that emphasize the stories of individuals in marginalized groups and have your group discuss them. Our previous blog post can help you with some memoirs to start. 

    3. Living Story.  Get the group to engage with a marginalized group for at least a day-long project. I’ve seen some of these projects last up to a year.  For some thoughts on how business leaders can and should do this, check out this post here.

    4. Critiquing the Story.  Put major news network names (CNN, Fox, NBC, etc.) up separately as labels on the wall.  Get participants to stand/sit by the network they watch the most. Then get them to critique their own source of information with the group they are sitting with.  What leanings and biases do the networks have? Then, what might the impact on their personal conscious or unconscious thoughts and therefore decisions and behaviors be based on due to their news source(s)?  

    You can also do this for social media channels and consider how actually showing The Social Dilemma to the group might enhance the session discussion and opportunities for insights to take place. 

    When we engage in these types of activities, we get to know people. We build relationships.  And when we know people it makes it much harder to hate them, or people that are “like” them.  

    As Abraham Lincoln said, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” 

    What do you think is creating the polarization in our country and what can you do as a leader to impact DE&I efforts for your organization?